Rate Your Music score: 3.42 out of 5!
The power of suggestion!
I'm absolutely certain I heard this lost hit on the radio when it was current. Then somehow I forgot about it for 35 years. It's not the only time I've forgotten an action-packed song like this. It's usually because a personal crisis wiped out my memory of the preceding weeks. One example is "Save Me" by Fleetwood Mac - a lost hit also. Maybe I forgot "Fool Moon Fire" because pretty much all of life became a crisis, but I doubt that, as the song was a hit right when things were improving because I was about to transfer out of one of the many bad schools I attended.
Right after I remembered this long-lost song again, I found an old WCLU survey sheet on a website that included it. This seemed to trigger a faint memory of hearing it on the car radio in the school parking lot near the end of 4th grade. But this could just be...the power of suggestion! I might not have actually heard it there, because I usually took the school bus home then. But I probably did, because there were enough times back then when I got after-school detention and my parents drove me home instead.
That's an indictment of the school - not me. After the incident in which a teacher locked me in a hot car at the Kentucky Horse Park, it was becoming clear to everyone that the school was full of shit. (Shockingly, she was still teaching at a different school just recently.) Academically, it was a joke too. Whenever I completed an assignment in class, the teacher just sent me to sit on the floor and read the same books for 5-year-olds over and over again. That wasn't the same teacher who tied me to a chair and stuffed a handkerchief in my mouth like a hostage. On the other hand, schools were doing things like that all the time 3 or 4 years ago and were cheered by the smarmy charlatans on The Today Show.
I also have a memory of going to Taste of Cincinnati around that time and thinking it was insufferably boring. After all, it's not the most exciting event, but there just isn't much recreation around here, and it rains all the time.
An online comment said the reason "Fool Moon Fire" wasn't a big hit was because the record label was involved in some squabble about promoting it. Indeed, there probably weren't any big hits on the Hot 100 in the 1980s that didn't have some support from corrupt promoters. For example, the promoters began blackballing "Turn Me Loose" by Loverboy because some execs at Columbia wouldn't play the promoters' game. The promoters had to do it their way or no way at all.
I never saw the "Fool Moon Fire" video until I found it on YouTube. It came out a year before Michael Jackson's "Thriller" clip, but the gist of it is pretty much the same.
I once was a fresh young kid. Nothing could drag me down. Except 4th grade.
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